Thursday, August 5, 2010 - 2:50 PM

COS 98-5: Landscape fragmentation and its relations with urbanization and social and economic developments in Beijing urban region, China

Jiangxiao Qiu, Xiaoke Wang, Fei Lu, and Zhiyun Ouyang. Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Background/Question/Methods Substantial attention has been recently focused on the phenomenon of landscape fragmentation in urban regions that results from unprecedented anthropogenic disturbances in the process of urbanization. Landscape fragmentation is increasingly considered as an essential environmental indicator that endangers biological diversity, threatens sustainable land management, deteriorates hydrological services and influences biogeochemical processes of urban ecological systems. With the recognition of these impacts has thus promoted the need to quantify landscape fragmentation patterns for environmental protection and ecological conservation. In this study, selecting Beijing urban region as an example, we applied a series sampling techniques combined with spatial metrics in an attempt to clearly demonstrate spatial distributions and local differences of landscape fragmentation and investigate its relations with urbanization and social and economic developments, which has received minimal attention in the context of urban regions.

Results/Conclusions Specifically, results indicate that landscape fragmentation in urban fringes and urbanizing frontiers is generally higher than that in the central and rural areas and it commonly takes on an inverted “U” shape along urban-to-rural gradient. In addition, the relation between landscape fragmentation and degree of urbanization can be represented as a multinomial curve with an inverted “U” shape that exhibits a threshold of the changes of landscape fragmentation as the degree of urbanization reaches between 42%—45%; and this relationship, in essence, reflected the urban growth theory and dynamics of landscape fragmentation in response to urbanization: that is, the urbanization process has brought about enormous intensification of landscape fragmentation in the initial stages of urbanization whereas dramatically decreased its degree when urban built-up areas become dominant. Further investigation on the uneven spatial distribution of landscape fragmentation revealed the social and economic driving forces that contribute to influence landscape fragmentation and transform landscape compositions. Besides, this study applied correlation and regression analysis to explore the linkages between social and economic variables and urban landscape fragmentation and landscape patterns, which have important implications for effective spatial planning and sustainable landscape management in urban regions.